Two separate incidents seemed to occur that pretty much crumbled my optimism when I was a bit younger.

One day when I was living in Kyoto when I was around 4 years old, my family stopped right in front of our apartment on a semi-busy street, but when I opened the curb-side door, a motorcyclist suddenly slammed into it (there's an issue of people riding in the narrow space between the cars and the curb because efficiency or something, whatever). There was blood fucking everywhere right in front of me, and I had absolutely no idea how to process what was happening. I didn't realize the severity of what just happened until my mom ran into the apartment building alone in hysterical tears; she couldn't stand to see the scene. Or me. I'm still not sure. It was horrifying.

Event 2 requires some context: it was actually only about 3 years ago in high school in Burnaby. For most of my childhood I wanted to be a games programmer because I was very interested in gaming and my parents were interested in math. Because Japanese. They didn't have a lot of programming courses nearby or at school until grade 12, but I studied hard on my sciences and calculus to get a spot. But once I did, I realized I was fucking dysmal at it; the syntax and diction was too bizarre for me, I couldn't remember all the terms, and I wasn't creative enough to make use of any of it.

Basically I just realized "holy fuck, I just spent 5 years working on a complete waste." When my parents realized we had just poured in a bajillion hours in study and tutoring to realize my dream goal was not meant to be, they were furious. No chance of changing to anything else, no university, no future.

But that's context, basically when my parents broke down realizing that their daughter has wasted her school life, or at least that's what they were trying to tell me. We screamed back and forth for hours at how much of a failure I was and how I was going to be stuck at McDonalds for the rest of my life and explicetely told me to "leave this house." And I did.

I immediately packed everything, moved into a friend's place for a while, and have since lost my ties with them. My parents basically disowned me, shattering all optimism I had left in me.

I'm trying my best to put on a brave face and be happy for what I have now, but it still really, really hurts.